Anonymous Interview Technique

Looking to make a goofy documentary, and I need to figure out how to create anonymous interviews. What I would like are some lighting ideas on how to create the silhouette effect of someone talking, but you can't make out there face. I also need to mask their voice somehow.

I also would like to figure out how to pixelate someone's face like it is done on the show 'Cops'.

Can I get this done with FCE and maybe running the audio through a filter or something in GarageBand?

The lighting issue depends on whether you're shooting on film or on video. The process is basically the same, but it's more complicated when shooting on video as the sensitivity levels are different. Either way, you use a back light and no key or fill lights. Simple as that.

For the pixelated face, you need to make a mask around the person's face using one of the shapes. Then in that shape you need to apply a filter like a gaussian blur or something that pixelates the video. It's very possible that you will need to keyframe the mask so that it moves with the person's head.

I would read through the help documents or manual on masks so that you can understand how they work and then add different filters to get what you want.

I've done anonymous interviews "for real" and yes, to get the silhouette you just use a backlight to light the subject, nothing else. This'll be a lot easier if your camera has a manual iris so that it doesn't try to compensate.

Get it as good as you can, then in FCE use levels or a color corrector to bring the darks down all the way to black.

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